nude highway driving

My friend Diablo — with whom I used to share three-Guinness lunches to counteract extreme job frustration at a startup in Boulder and the painful sound of trustafarians who think they can drum — has been trying to push me back to the laptop to update this space. This space which I originally had planned to “write in every day!” Yikes. But he’s asking, so I’m writing.

Diablo found me about a year ago because of this site. I guess that’s one thing the Web is good for — finding old friends. Another friend I never, ever thought I’d see again found me by typing “bingo hand job” in Google. Life is cool.

I also use the Web to find old friends — some I know, some I’ve never met. You see, when I was a teenager I spent a lot of time in my room with “my friends” — posters, albums and cassette tapes of musicians I dug. I wasn’t a total recluse or anything, I just felt connected to the music and the people who made it. I felt closer to them than most of the people I saw each day. Every once in a while I wonder “whatever happened to …” and I start searching. Such musings were difficult to satiate before the Web. Now it’s not so hard.

One of my closest aural friends was a cassette tape called “The Decline of Western Civilization,” a soundtrack for the documentary of the L.A. punk scene circa 1979-1980. The thing blew me away — it was infinitely far from me both in time and space, but it was a big part of my teen life. I would have killed to go halfway across the country and back in time five years to be there. I still would. I never actually saw the movie until five years later in college, finding it at a rental shop. I still wish I had stolen that tape, as I didn’t see it again until two nights ago when I found via Bittorrent (thanks, Internet!).

I started snooping around, and I found out (I’m sure this is old-ass news to some friends) that there’s a movie coming out about The Germs! Even better, the three living members of the band are touring with the actor who plays Darby Crash because he did such a good job of playing the madman. The shows have had some good reviews, and it looks like they are pretty damn tight together. I’m fairly sure they won’t be coming to Tokyo (if they do, they have a place to crash — get it? I slay me), but I’ll probably seriously consider a trip to California should they keep the gigs going. (Sidenote: I had one of my first feelings of “These damn kids today, they don’t understand” in 1996 when I saw Foo Fighters at the Ogden Theatre in Denver. I’m surrounded by all these people saying “Oh my God, it’s the drummer from Nirvana!” and I’m thinking to myself “Oh my God — I can’t believe I’m finally seeing Pat Smear play live!”) I can remember driving around with a blue circle hanging in my 1977 Datsun. And I still believe the amazing power of The Germs is vastly underestimated. The guitar on “No God” alone is one of the baddest things you’ll ever hear — the perfect punk-rock riff. And I love the fact that Belinda Carlisle’s first musical experience was as their drummer.

After uncovering this I thought “What the fuck was the story on Alice Bag Band?” They have a song on the soundtrack and are in the movie, but I never really heard anything else about them growing up. Sure enough, they have a Wikipedia entry. This led me to Alice Bag’s homepage, which has a great scrapbook of the old L.A. punk scene. You’ll find some cool surprises in there. And she’s only gotten sexier with age. Damn. (shiver) She also writes an amazing blog (now with kick-ass podcasts!), and penned one of the greatest explanations of the fleetingness of time (in regards to “back in the day”). I’ve been thoroughly enjoying reading and listening to her, even if I know there’s probably very little chance she and Jane Wiedlin will show up in Japan and stomp on me.

I sorta know what happened to Black Flag, Circle Jerks and X (still mind-blowing live; I only hope I get to catch The Knitters), so I didn’t spend a lot of time on them the other night. I was curious about Fear, though. I liked their stuff as a kid, only to be disillusioned in 1994 when I saw them (actually Lee Ving with a bunch of new kids) in Lawrence, Kan., and realized he was just a stupid racist asshole. Still, I wanted to see the infamous performance on “Saturday Night Live” I’d been hearing about for 20 years … they supposedly induced chaos on the set and trashed their dressing room. Thanks to YouTube, you can see a piece of that 1981 madness.

The great thing, at least to me, about finding blogs of people you used to look up to and/or rock out to but at some point lost track of is that you see they are regular people. They may still be cool as hell — Alice Bag and Bob Mould are way cooler than I ever will be — but they are still just people. They cease to be posters or frozen-in-time concert moments of infinite youth — they become aging mortals who deal with all the same shit that we deal with. And I think it’s fascinating to see what they’re up to. (And I love the fact that I can easily find a site dedicated to my favorite record label, or find a gaggle of interviews with people with whom I’m actually interested in seeing interviews be conducted.)

It’s almost enough to make me forgive the Web for the dancing hamsters.